Enter your entry price, leverage, and maintenance margin. Find exactly how far the market needs to move before your position gets liquidated.
Liquidation price is the price at which a leveraged crypto position gets forcibly closed by the exchange. It is the point where your losses have consumed your initial margin, leaving the exchange at risk of absorbing the difference. Understanding this calculation before entering a position is not optional — it is the difference between a controlled loss and a catastrophic wipeout.
The formula for isolated margin uses your entry price, leverage, and the exchange's maintenance margin rate. For a long position: liquidation price equals entry multiplied by (1 minus 1/leverage plus maintenance margin/100). For a short position: entry multiplied by (1 plus 1/leverage minus maintenance margin/100). At 10× leverage with 0.5% maintenance margin on a $60,000 BTC long, this gives approximately $54,300 — a 9.5% adverse move.
The mathematical reality of high leverage in crypto is brutal. Bitcoin's average daily volatility is roughly 3–4%. At 25× leverage, your liquidation price is approximately 3.5% from your entry. A single normal trading day can liquidate a 25× position. At 50×, any 2% move in the wrong direction ends the position. At 100×, you are effectively betting on the next 30-minute candle direction with your entire margin at stake.
Major exchanges offer up to 125× leverage on crypto futures. This exists to generate trading fees from the volume of retail accounts that get liquidated — not because it is a viable trading tool for real market participants. Professional crypto derivatives traders typically use 3–10× leverage and place their liquidation price 20–30% away from entry.
The choice between isolated and cross margin changes what gets liquidated, not whether liquidation happens. With isolated margin, your loss is capped at the margin you explicitly allocated to that position. With cross margin, the exchange pulls from your entire available balance to keep the position alive, potentially draining everything before closing it.
For traders holding multiple positions simultaneously, isolated margin is almost always preferable. It prevents one catastrophic trade from cascading into your entire book. This calculator uses the isolated margin formula — the most common and predictable scenario.
The most important practical rule: your stop loss should always trigger at a price before your liquidation price. If your stop loss and liquidation price are within 1–2% of each other, you are using too much leverage for the trade setup you have chosen. Either widen your stop (which means reducing position size to maintain the same dollar risk), reduce leverage, or take a different trade.
Getting liquidated without a stop loss means you held a losing position all the way to zero margin. Getting stopped out means you took a controlled loss as planned. The first is a failure of risk management. The second is professional execution.
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